Other
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Who Needs Philosophy?
Back when I was a little boy, living in a yellow stucco house in San Diego, I would sit in the hot tub at night, under desert-clear stars, listen to the coyotes howl and ask my Dad about those dead…
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A Little Bit About AK Press
For the past couple years I have been an enthusiastic supporter of the Oakland-based AK Press, a small, “anarchist collective” press that publishes about twenty to thirty books a year, most of which deal with radical politics, current affairs, anarchist/leftist…
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America Wants to Gay Marry the Phrase “Gay Marry”
Mark Peters takes a look at the linguistic and cultural meanings behind America’s favorite new idiom: “gay marry.” You know, as in… “‘I going [sic] to do unspeakable things to this sandwich. Like gay-marry it.’ June 23, 2009, Alison Agosti,…
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Morning Coffee
70 golden cages of light in Northern France. We’re not sure what the point is, but it certainly is pretty. In Oslo they are building new crystaline skyscrapers. Meanwhile, in Hiroshima, they are going in the opposite direction. The worst…
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Like a Pack of Alaskan Dogs
“Ed Paulsen was nineteen in 1931. He was a job applicant. San Francisco. ‘I’d get up at five in the morning and head for the waterfront. Outside the Spreckels Sugar Refinery, outside the gates, there would be a thousand men.…
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Morning Coffee
Did you know that in the 1950s and 60s the CIA used prostitutes to test out the possible mind control effects of LSD on the general populace. Operation Midnight Climax has all the details. (via Metafilter.) While we’re on the…
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Country Music in Kenya & Mumbai
“Country music has fans wherever people are departing rural areas. In other words, worldwide. Turns out that the weeping tunes about better days can be understood even without understanding the lyrics. That crying slide guitar is the perfect accompaniment for…
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Stephen Burt On Enjoying New Poetry
Over the weekend, I finally got around to unboxing and shelving my archived litmags in the new apartment. As I placed my issues of the Believer back into magazine files in proper order, the top headline on the cover of the…
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But what if I believe in Bigfoot AND werewolves?
Science Daily says that British historian Brian Regal says that Darwinian evolution killed werewolves, replacing that myth with another sylvan mystery, our old friend Bigfoot. Not sure I’m entirely buying, since the humanoid half-man is not exactly a nineteenth century…
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Morning Coffee
Sarah Palin threatens to sue the Internet. (we don’t generally go here, as this is plenty covered on Huffpo and everywhere else, but when someone threatens to sue the Internet we take it seriously.) The purpose of a book cover.…